The Origins of Language

There is no more effective code for representing the world in its intri­cate detail and for making and communicating sophisticated messages than the verbal one. Language makes it possible to summon up past events, to refer to incidents that have not as yet occurred, to formulate questions about existence, to answer them, to conjure up fictional worlds, to give thoughts and actions a preservable form. What is this extraordinary code? Is it a species-specific genetic endowment, devel­oped over many years of adaptive trial and error? Or is it something that the human species invented in an attempt to fulfill some basic need?

The answer, in our view, is affirmative to both of these questions. Language is surely the result of some innate faculty; but it is also some­thing that humanity could have easily done without in order to survive as a species. Moreover, there seems to be no biological reason for its utilization by humans to formulate questions about existence and about themselves. Language is not an innate mental organ, as some linguists claim. Indeed, if we were somehow to shut off subsequent generations from language, there is virtually no doubt that the human species would have to start all over reinventing it. Organs, on the other hand, cannot be reinvented in our progeny. What we inherit from our biological heritage is not a language organ, but the capacity for verbal semiosis—a capacity tied to our secondary modeling system (chapter 3,§3.2).

The lengths to which some have gone to throw light on the enigma of language origins are quite extraordinary. It is reported by the Greek historian Herodotus that in the seventh century BC the Egyptian king Psamtik (663-610 BC) devised an experiment to determine the original language of humanity. He gave two new-born babies of ordinary peo­ple to a shepherd to nurture among his flocks. The shepherd was com­manded not to utter any speech before them. The children were to live by themselves in a solitary habitation. At appropriate hours the shep­herd was instructed to bring goats to them, give them their fill of milk, and carry out the necessary tasks to ensure their survival. After two years the shepherd brought the babies, raised in the prescribed manner, before Psamtik. The first word uttered by the two sounded like be-cos—the ancient Phrygian word for bread. The over-anxious Psamtik immediately declared Phrygian to be the mother tongue of humanity. Whether or not Psamtik's experiment ever took place at all is an open historical question. But even if it had, it certainly would not have proved anything. The babbling sounds made by the children-in prob­able imitation of each other-were interpreted, or more accurately mis­interpreted, as constituting the word becos by Psamtik.

The enigma of language origins has spawned countless specula­tions throughout the millennia. This is why the Linguistic Society of Paris imposed its notorious ban in 1866 on all discussions related to this question, as did Ihn Philological Society of London a half century later in 1911. In the early 1970s, however, interest in this conundrum was rekindled, as a result of the intriguing and suggestive findings that were being accumulated in such interrelated fields of inquiry as arche­ology, paleography, animal ethology, sociobiology, psychology, neu­rology, anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics. Language scientists came to see these as tantalizing bits and pieces for solving the puzzle of language origins.

One possibility is that language developed from echoism, i.e. from attempts of early humans to imitate natural sounds and react vocally to emotions. Indirect evidence for echoism as an originating force can be discerned in the onomatopoeic words and interjections that make up the core vocabularies of all languages. But echoism on its own fails to explain the evolutionary transition from onomatopoeic words to the development of syntax and discourse. Nevertheless, echoism cannot be dismissed entirely as a factor in language origins. After all, there really is no way to determine whether or not sound imitation played a much more pivotal creative role in prehistoric times than it does today. Moreover, as we saw in the previous chapter (§4.6), the probable appo­sition of manual signs with osmotic vocal imitations of their referents may have been the factor that led over time to the replacement of the former by the latter.

Another possibility is that speech grew out of the chants that the members of the first hominid groups vocalized to maintain harmony as they worked together. As social needs increased, so did the means for communicating them. But, then, what mental feature could have sparked the process by which chanting became full language? Moreo­ver, as Sebeok (1986) suggests, communication is not a necessary func­tion of language, since humans have many nonverbal means of com­municating available to them. And as Chomsky (1975: 57) has aptly remarked, "there seems no reason to single out communication among the many uses to which language is put."

One of the first to investigate the question of language origins rig­orously was the linguist Morris Swadesh (1971), who started by divid­ing the evolution of language into four primary periods that corre­sponded to the Eolithic (the dawn stone age), Paleolithic (the old stone age), Neolithic (the new stone age), and Historical (the last 10,000 years) periods. He then suggested that all languages in the world today sprang from one source during the Paleolithic period when Neander­thals still survived. This scenario was challenged on several counts. But Swadesh's method showed, once and for all, that a scientific approach to the age-old puzzle of language origins was conceivable. Using data from archeology and anthropology, together with a detailed knowl­edge of previous work on language change and reconstruction, Swadesh demonstrated how a credible primal scene could be drafted, and how the transition to contemporary language behavior could be explained plausibly.

Swadesh's work was also instrumental in rekindling the nine­teenth-century interest in language comparison—the meticulous com­parison of the structures and systems of related languages in order to make hypotheses about their common ancestor or proto-language. By the end of the nineteenth century language scientists had amassed suffi­cient evidence to suggest that most of the modern Eurasian languages had evolved from a single language. They called this language Proto-Indo-European (PIE), hypothesizing that it was spoken long before the first civilizations of 5000 years ago, and that it had split up into differ­ent languages in the subsequent millennium. The formation of lan­guages from one source came to be known as diversification. Shortly thereafter, linguists started to apply the same comparison techniques to other language families. The motivating idea behind such efforts was that it would be possible eventually to piece together the mother tongue of humanity through the reconstruction of various proto-languages.

The work on PIE has made it the most useful proto-language for modern theories of language origins, for the simple reason that knowl­edge about it is detailed and extensive. Already in the nineteenth cen­tury, linguists had a pretty good idea both of what PIE sounded like and of what kind of vocabulary it had. PIE had words for animals, plants, parts of the body, tools, weapons, and various abstract notions. It is this stock of reconstructed lexical items that has helped contempo­rary linguists paint a fairly good picture of the semantic range of one of the first vocabularies utilized by human beings.

By going further and further down the branches toward the "trunk" or "roots" of the proto-linguistic tree, modern-day reconstruc-tionists have been better and better able to formulate viable hypotheses about what one of the first proto-languages spoken by humans—which they have designated "Nostratic" (from Latin nosier "ours")—might have been like. Actually, the idea of a common linguistic ancestor was bandied about within traditional reconstructionist circles. Pedersen (1931: 338), for instance, suggested the term Nostratian as "a compre­hensive designation for the families of languages which are related to Indo-European." The value of the current work on Nostratic lies in the fact that it has put in front of contemporary linguists a kind of proto-lexicon of human language that can be assessed to generate hypotheses about how language originated.



Source: Analyzing cultures: an introduction and handbook / Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1999.